by Armin Kanitsar, Rainer Wegenkittl, Dominik Fleischmann, Meister Eduard Gröller

Abstract

Traditional volume visualization techniques may provide incomplete clinical information needed for many applications in medical visualization. Especially in the area of vascular visualization important features such as the patent lumen of a diseased vessel segment may not be visible. Curved Planar Reformation (CPR) has proven to be an acceptable practical solution. Existing CPR techniques, however, still have diagnostically relevant limitations. In this paper we introduce two advanced methods for efficient vessel visualization, based on the concept of CPR. Both methods benefit from relaxation of spatial coherence in favor of improved feature perception. We present a new technique to visualize the interior of a vessel in a single image. A vessel is re-sampled along a spiral around the vessel central axis. The helical spiral depicts the vessel volume. Furthermore, a method to display an entire vascular tree without mutually occluding vessels is presented. Minimal rotations around the branching points of a vessel tree eliminate occlusions. For each viewing direction the entire vessel structure is visible.

Keywords: computed tomography angiography, vessel analysis, curved planar reformation

Download full paper

Armin Kanitsar, Rainer Wegenkittl, Dominik Fleischmann, Meister Eduard Gröller, "Advanced Curved Planar Reformation: Flattening of Vascular Structures", submitted to IEEE Visualization 2003, AKanitsar_Adv.pdf (2.371KB).

Figures in the paper

Figure 1:

An untangled vascular tree of the peripheral arteries.
Figure 2:

Traditional CPR (a), and helical CPR (b) generation.
Figure 3:

Spiral-of-interest (a), constant angle sampling (b), con-stant arc-length sampling (c)
Figure 4:

Phantom dataset: Direct volume rendering (a); Coronal (b) and sagittal (c) straightened CPR; Helical CPR with constant arc-length (d) and fixed angle (e).
Figure 5:

A straightened CPR (b), an helical CPR with constant angle sampling (a), and constant arc-length sampling (c) of a real world dataset.
Figure 6:

The vessel hull primitive.
Figure 7:

The three vessel hull combination cases.
Figure 8:

Assembling of vessel hulls.
Figure 9:

Different layout definition.
Figure 10:

Comparison of introduced distortion.
Figure 11:

Image space partitioning.
Figure 12:

A peripheral CTA dataset rendered from coronal and sagittal view using stretched multi-path CPR (a, c) and untangled CPR (b, d) respectively (fixed layout)
Figure 13:

A color coded sequence of untangled CPR images from different re-sampling directions.

Additional Material

A short collection of animations related to this work:
Animation 1:

A color coded sequence of untangled CPR images from different re-sampling directions (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~0.000KB)     high resolution (~9.111KB)
Animation 2:

Assembling of vessel hulls (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~0.000KB)     high resolution (~6.301KB)
Animation 3:

Untangled CPR with adaptive layout (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~0.000KB)     high resolution (~12.425KB)
Animation 4:

Untangled CPR with fixed layout (.avi)
low resolution (mpg) (~0.000KB)     high resolution (~12.518KB)

BibTeX Entry

@INPROCEEDINGS{kanitsar:2003:Adv,
  author =      {Armin Kanitsar and Rainer Wegenkittl and Dominik 
                 Fleischmann and Meister Eduard Gr\"oller},
  title =       {{A}dvanced {C}urved {P}lanar {R}eformation: {F}lattening of 
                 {V}ascular {S}tructures},
  booktitle =    {{IEEE} {V}isualization 2003},
  year =        {2003},
  month =        oct,
  pages =       {43--50},
  keywords =    {computed tomography angiography, vessel analysis, 
                 curved planar reformation},
  institution = {Institute of Computer Graphics and Algorithms,
                 Vienna University of Technology},
  url =          {http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/vis/adapt/},
  note =        {human contact: technical-report@cg.tuwien.ac.at}
}